Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder

Laura Ingalls Wilder

(Slate) The word dreams in the subtitle of Caroline Fraser’s new book, Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder, is plural for a reason. Laura’s Little House novels, based on her childhood experiences living on homesteads around the Midwest in the late 1800s, braid two dreams together into a single thread, fused by, as Fraser puts it, the “purity” of Laura’s voice, the way her longing for the past and its ordinary pleasures sings through all of the books.
The first dream, and the most powerful, is the memory of a childhood made happy by the warm, steady, joyful love of Laura’s parents for their children and for each other. The second is the fantasy of pioneer life, of self-sufficient family farms wrested from the wilderness by sheer hard work and gumption. This dream takes the form of a story that begins in a covered wagon and ends, if not in outright prosperity, then at least in comfort and—above all—independence. Continued